This is Lecture 1 for Lesson 5. Making great maps is all about understanding cartography. And cartography is the art and science of making maps. It's those two very different things kept in tension that make cartography fun. Maps are always simplifications of reality, and cartographers wrestle with that problem. And simplification is what makes maps helpful when we need to make a decision, explain patterns, or even find a bucket of delicious fried chicken. Maps are ultimately designed by people who have intentions like you and me, and we have to map responsibly. Here are four examples of how you can tell a different story with the same basic data using maps. These are all from a book called Making Maps, by John Krygier and Dennis Wood. A really nice little cartography textbook. Each of these maps shows the same fundamental thing. It shows the proposed impact of building a new connector road between two major roads in a small town. The first map on the left shows how that connector road might go through an area with relatively low property values. Which from a developer prospective might be good. The second map shows how that same connector road would go through an African-American neighborhood and bifurcate the community. Which would be bad. The third map shows how that same connector road would actually impact an historic district. And finally, the fourth map, on the right shows how that connector road would actually go around the densest area of business activity in the city. Which could be bad for business. So, each of these four maps is legitimate, right? And there's no reason you couldn't make these maps. And they fundamentally talk about the same basic story about what might this connector road do to this small town. But you can tell that there are very different stories that you could tell with these different maps. And it's up to you as the cartographer to make a good decision about how you design these things. You have to answer three key questions when you get started with mapping. The first one is who wants your map? Is it ten experts, is it 20,000 people you've never met before in a MOOC? That's pretty important to figure out. You gotta know where it will be seen. Is it going to be seen on a small piece of paper? Does it need to be printed in black and white? Or is it going to show up in a web map that might be used on a phone, a tablet, a regular laptop, or even on a giant screen in Times Square. You gotta know the output format. You also really need to understand what's the purpose of the map? What story are you trying to tell? Or what context are you trying to create for someone else to tell the story? Is it to explain how your down has changed over time? That would be pretty hard to do. Or is it designed to help somebody plan a pub crawl? That might be a little bit easier. Each of these questions deserves a really well thought out answer before you begin mapping. One of the first things you begin doing when you make a map is designing a layout. And really what you want to try to get is a balance layout. The map you have, maybe you have multiple maps on one page. The title, legend, scale bar, source text, images, all kinds of other stuff you might jam on there. All of those elements need to be positioned and sized relative to one another. That's really the key thing about designing the layout. The goal here is really to shape that general layout design around the answers that you have to those three general design questions. Here's an example of a really poorly design layout, from Designing Better Maps, which is a great guide book by Cindy Brewer. And she created this example to show a bad layout first, and I'll show you a good one in a second. So, this layout doesn't really have any structure, does it? It's got a title and source information and it has three different, little maps. But there's not really any creative use of the page here, right? It's just all kind of slammed together. Contrast that to this which is the same exact set of elements laid out in a nice visual hierarchy on the page. And here everything nests together nicely, so that the flow of the information is very clear. This is a great example of how to take something that's not too good, like the original image, and make something really nice out of it. Just by tweaking the layout itself. So, layout stuff's important. Another really imporant aspect of map making is figuring out how you're going to simbolize things. And symbolization is really about simplifying reality. We have to use symbols to represent features quite often. Points, lines, and polygons can all be graphically manipulated to explain data. And symbolization can either emphasize the visual connection to a real feature, so it could look like the thing it's supposed to be, like a coffee cup, represent a coffee, place to get coffee. Or they can be very abstract. I might use a star to indicate that this is the capital city for a country. Not that capital cities for countries every look like stars, right? Here's an example of simple point symbols that do use some of those iconic kind of things to show you where things are. This is a wonderful little regional map that I've made of one of my favorite places. This is Lower Mapistan. And it shows the locations of Silky Lattes, Fancy Hotels, and Delicious Breakfasts. This is the kind of map I would need if I'm on a road trip somewhere, for example. You can also do things with point symbols where you derive the symbol's size and shape itself by the underlying data. You've seen this in class already. On the left here, I have proportional symbols and on the right I have graduated symbols. They're the same kind of symbol, they're both circles. On the left, I have people currently unable to pay the cable bill. And these symbols are sized in proportion to the original data values. I set a minimum size, and then I let the symbol get bigger and I let that be proportional to the actual data value of that place. On the right hand side in contrast, I set three different symbol sizes. And then, I have each one of those symbol sizes correspond to a range of data values. So, basically there's a category, right? And as you can see on the left, it's a little bit hard to compare some of the mid and smaller sized values. Because they're not exactly all the same size, right? You get a better sense with proportional symbols of the true diversity of the underlying data. Whereas on the right with the graduated symbols, it's easier to compare things, because you have just a few set symbol sizes. And visually it's pretty easy to pick out the low, the medium, and the high stuff. So, there are good reasons to use both of these methods with point symbology. Finally, there's multivariate symbols. And in this particular case I'm looking at answers to this very important survey about how do you roll. That's the question I'm answering here. So, some people roll downhill. Some people roll on 22s. And some people roll laid back style. Lower Mapistan is a diverse place. And so, these multivariate symbols here are just pie charts, right. You could use bar charts, and there's tons of other methods that are possible. Maybe you could think of some and post some of your own ideas in the forums, and then let me know how it is that you roll.
